By: Laksha Kumari
When I first began covering environmental stories — floods erasing villages overnight, rivers choked with industrial waste, communities displaced by droughts they did nothing to cause — I thought the hardest part would be witnessing the suffering. I was wrong. The hardest part is staying alive long enough to tell it.
As a journalist covering climate and environmental issues in Pakistan, I have learned something no textbook teaches: reporting itself can be dangerous. Not only because of nature’s fury — the floodwaters, the collapsed roads, the absence of medical help — but because of the human forces that resist accountability. Every story about illegal deforestation, industrial pollution, or government inaction is also a story someone, somewhere, does not want to tell. In Pakistan, the consequences of telling inconvenient truths can be severe.
I have sat with journalists who received threats after reporting on polluters. I have spoken with reporters who navigate disaster zones without safety equipment, without insurance, sometimes without a plan for getting home. I have listened to women journalists describe harassment that follows them from the field into their phones and social media feeds. Each account pointed to the same truth: without journalist safety, there is no environmental journalism. And without environmental journalism, the communities most damaged by climate change — the poorest, the most marginalized, the most invisible — have no voice.
This piece is my attempt to document that danger. To put numbers into what many of us already feel in our bones. To amplify the voices of reporters who walk into flood zones and hostile terrain so the rest of the world can know what is happening. Their safety is not just a professional footnote. It is the foundation on which all truthful reporting stands.
Journalism Under Siege
The numbers demand attention. Between 2006 and 2024, more than 1,700 journalists were killed worldwide and in roughly 85 percent of those cases, the killers were never brought to justice. That culture of impunity is itself a weapon: when perpetrators know they will not be punished, the message to every other journalist is clear.
But killing is only the most visible form of danger. Journalists are also kidnapped, detained, surveilled, stripped of their equipment, and buried under strategic lawsuits designed to silence and bankrupt them. For women journalists, the threat extends aggressively online, UNESCO reports that 73 percent of women journalists surveyed have experienced threats, intimidation, or targeted abuse directly tied to their work.
The figure most relevant to this story: attacks on journalists covering environmental issues rose by 42 percent between 2019 and 2024. This is not coincidence. As environmental destruction becomes more politically and economically charged — as the interests of polluters, land grabbers, and corrupt officials grow more entangled with the stories journalists are trying to tell — the danger of telling those stories has risen in direct proportion. The environment beat is no longer just physically hazardous. It has become one of the most targeted fields in journalism.
The Plight of Pakistani Reporters
For journalists in Pakistan, these dangers are not abstract. They are daily and lived. Pakistan ranked 158th out of 180 countries on the 2025 RSF World Press Freedom Index, among the most hostile media environments on the planet.
The data bears this out. Freedom Network’s 2024 Impunity Report documented six journalist killings, eleven assassination attempts, and 57 total press freedom violations in a single year. Press freedom violations had already surged 63 percent in the preceding year — from 86 cases to 140 — averaging at least one violation every three days.
What makes these figures especially damning is the near-total absence of accountability. No convictions were recorded in 96 percent of journalist killings between 2012 and 2022. Both the federal government and Sindh’s provincial government have enacted journalist protection laws — and both have formally constituted safety commissions under them. But neither commission is functional. Paralysed by bureaucratic red tape and the absence of operational rules and bylaws, they exist on paper while journalists remain exposed in the field. The legislation exists. The political will to enforce it does not.
What Journalists Say?
To understand what environmental reporting looks and feels like on the ground, three journalists who cover climate and environmental issues in Pakistan agreed to speak — on condition of anonymity. Their words reflect both the courage and the vulnerability that define this work.
Reporter A — Environmental Correspondent
On threats from powerful actors: “When you report on illegal deforestation or industrial dumping, you quickly learn who has something to lose. I have received calls — not always explicit, but clear enough — warning me to drop a story. Local influentials, people connected to land grabbers or factory owners, have ways of making their displeasure known. Sometimes it is a phone call. Sometimes it is someone showing up where you are working.”
On legal harassment: “The FIR is the weapon of choice. You publish something that implicates a powerful interest, and within days there is a case registered against you — cybercrime charges under PECA Act, defamation, something. The charges rarely hold up, but that is not the point. The point is to exhaust you, frighten you, and send a message to others watching.”
On what it costs to keep reporting: “You learn to calculate risk before every story. Not just physical risk — financial risk, legal risk, the risk to your family. Some stories I have held back not because I lacked evidence, but because I could not afford the consequences of publishing them. That silence is its own kind of harm.”
Reporter B — Disaster Coverage Reporter
On state and non-state surveillance: “In areas where there are resource disputes — mining, water rights, land encroachment — you become aware that you are being watched. Your sources become nervous. People who spoke to you freely the first time go quiet the second time. Someone has been asking about you. That awareness changes how you work, and it changes what sources are willing to risk by talking to you.”
On institutional obstruction: “Government agencies can be remarkably uncooperative when a story reflects badly on them. Access gets denied, data requests go unanswered, officials who were available last week are suddenly unreachable. It is not always overt, but the pattern is consistent: the more sensitive the story, the more obstacles appear. It is a form of pressure that is difficult to document but impossible to ignore.”
On economic pressure: “I know colleagues who lost assignments — or lost their jobs — after filing stories that touched the wrong interests. Advertisers matter to editors. Owners matter to editors. When a story threatens a relationship that pays the bills, the story often loses. Self-censorship is not always fear of arrest. Sometimes it is fear of the electricity bill.”
Reporter C — Climate and Community Reporter
On digital harassment targeting women journalists: “After I published an investigation into a corporate polluter, the online response was coordinated and personal. It was not random trolling — it was targeted, it referenced details about my location and my family, and it was clearly designed to frighten me into silence. For women in this field, the field does not end when you leave it. It follows you home, onto your phone, into your private accounts.”
On the chilling effect: “The threats do not have to be carried out to be effective. A journalist who receives one serious threat will think twice before filing the next story. That is the calculation powerful actors are making — they do not need to stop every story. They only need to make the cost of telling the truth feel higher than most people can afford. Some of the most important environmental stories in this country are not being told. Not because no one knows them, but because no one can safely tell them.”
On why it still matters: “The communities most devastated by environmental destruction — the ones living next to the polluted river, the ones whose land has been grabbed — they have no other channel. If we do not tell their stories, those stories disappear. That is what keeps you going, even when you are afraid.”
The Story Must Go On
Environmental journalism in Pakistan is not a comfortable profession. It is, for many who practice it, an act of persistence against compounding odds — physical danger, legal harassment, digital threat, institutional obstruction, and an economy of silence maintained by those with the most to lose from accountability. The journalists whose voices appear in this story did not describe a crisis on the horizon. They described one already underway.
And yet they continue.
That persistence is not naivety. It is a clear-eyed understanding of what is at stake. Pakistan is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations — a country where glaciers are retreating, rivers are flooding with increasing fury, agricultural land is turning to dust, and communities are being unmade by disasters they did nothing to cause. The people living through these realities need witnesses. They need someone to carry their stories out of the flood zone, past the blocked road, through the legal threat and the midnight phone call, and into the public record. That is what environmental journalists do. That is what makes their safety a matter of public interest, not professional privilege.
The framework for protecting them exists. Pakistan’s journalist protection laws, at both federal and provincial levels, represent a meaningful legislative foundation. The safety commissions they mandate need to be activated, operationalised, and funded — not left paralysed by bureaucratic inertia while journalists remain exposed. Media organisations must move beyond treating safety as a liability clause and begin investing in it as an editorial value: insurance, training, legal support, and a culture that does not quietly punish reporters for the threats they attract. And the culture of impunity — documented across 96 percent of journalist killings over a decade — must be confronted directly by prosecutors, courts, and a political class that too often benefits from the silence that impunity produces.
None of this is beyond reach. It requires only the will to treat journalist safety as what it is: a precondition for informed democratic life.
The environmental crises reshaping Pakistan will not pause while institutions catch up. The floods will come again. The forests will continue to fall. The rivers will carry what industry puts into them. And somewhere in that landscape, a journalist — underpaid, underprotected, and frequently under threat — will be trying to document what is happening so the rest of us can know. The least we owe them is the infrastructure of safety that makes that work survivable.
Their stories are our only honest record of what this earth is going through. We cannot afford to lose the people telling them.
